According to Clarksons, in the first three months, a total of 199 newbuildings were contracted, mainly for offshore plant, MR product carrier and LPG carrier.

It turns out that HMD, STX, SPP contracted massive MR newbuildings.

As of the end of April, STX is known to have inked a total of 38 vessels, $2.2bn, including MR PCs, bulkers, LNG/LPG carriers, etc., while STX OSV books orders for offshore support vessels.

HMD has reached 32% of 2012 new order target, by contracting around 21 vessels, totalling $1bn, mainly medium-sized vessles. In March, it successfully penned its first platform support vessel and diversified its portfolio with high-value vessel.

Also, SPP contracted three MR tankers from a Greek owner Navios in February, two same-size more from a US owner. Recently, it won an order for two MR PCs from Maruta Industries of Japan.

Diana Shipping plans to continue fleet expansion in the coming quarters with the support of banks and its own cash reserves, according to Simeon Palios.

In a conference call with analysts and investors, the New York-listed bulker owner’s chief executive said a transaction may be sealed within the next couple of months or even sooner.

The company, which expects to see newbuildings and secondhand assets fall further below today’s historic lows, doesn’t believe the dry-bulk market will bottom until 2013 and intends to exploit opportunities before the tides turn.

“We are at the stage [where] we can buy now and we have to buy,” Palios said.

Qiligang Shipbuilding is one of several troubled shipbuilding firms in the eastern coastal Zhejiang province, the world's largest manufacturing base for small to medium-sized dry docks.

According to local media, around 80 percent of shipyards in Zhejiang have either suspended production or are operating at half their capacity.

"The grass is growing high in many yards that have closed due to a lack of orders," said Zhang Shouguo, secretary general of industry group the China Shipowners' Association.

"This is just the beginning of the woes for shipbuilders and the worst has yet to come."

To survive and keep some of the sector's 400,000 workers employed, shipyards must turn to less lucrative businesses such as leasing vessels, real estate or, in the worst case, tearing apart the ships they once used to build, industry experts say.

"Shipbuilding is a very cyclical industry and those who can maintain strength, complete structural restructuring and transform will be a major force after the recovery," said Zhang Yao, spokesman for Singapore-listed Yangzijiang Shipbuilding, one of China's largest vessel building firms.

"For others without flexibility to deal with the market changes, dormancy may be their best choice. Eventually more than 30 percent of existing shipbuilders will disappear."

His forecast is relatively optimistic compared to the view of other industry officials. The head of the government's China State Shipbuilding Corporation, Tan Zuojun, told local media in February he believed 50 percent of domestic shipyards would go bankrupt in the next two to three years.

"At the end of this year, you could see many shipyards turn into scrap yards," said Venkatesh Narayanaswamy, the former chairman of Dongfang Shipbuilding. "This would be the worst case scenario, because the profit margins are much lower."

Record demolition volume and shrinking orderbook arouse optimism in the dry bulk sector.

Peter Georgiopoulos has said the end is in sight for the dry bulk sector’s “nightmare” of overcapacity, as the effects of a shrinking orderbook and record demolition limit fleet growth this year.

For shipowners such as Mr Georgiopoulos, who is chairman of the board of New York-listed Genco Shipping & Trading, this indicates that the start of a recovery is near.

“We’re sort of getting to the end of this nightmare,” he said during the company’s first-quarter financial results conference call this week.

The newbuilding orderbook has been shrinking as deliveries have hit the water but also as fewer contracts have been placed.

With freight rates at near-record lows during the first quarter of this year in some dry bulk vessel sectors, a lack of confidence had not only seen the volume of newbuilding orders placed fall by 70% compared to 2011 but also spurred demolition activity.

Last year over 20m dwt of dry bulk tonnage was sold for recycling, but in the first four months of this year 10.8m dwt had already been committed for scrap as pressure on freight rates persisted and encouraged owners to send older, uneconomical ships for demolition.

Genco president Robert Gerald Buchanan said it was “a trend which we expect will continue” while Mr Georgiopoulos referred to forecasts that over 30m dwt could hit breakers’ yards in total this year.

With concerns circulating of a lack of shipbreaking capacity available globally, Mr Georgiopoulos also said it was a “great thing that there’s more scrapping capacity being built in the world, because we think we need it”.

Some of the scrapping capacity is understood to be coming from converted shipbuilding yards, he said.

Superior Energy Services of Houston, Texas, took delivery of one of the most advanced maritime training simulators ever developed, in April 2012.

The next-generation simulator from Kongsberg Maritime will be used to provide integrated, real-time training for Superior's offshore marine personnel at its new facility in Anchorage, Alaska.

Under the terms of the contract, signed September 2011, Kongsberg Maritime supplied Superior Energy Marine Technical Services with a full mission trainer in support of critical operations including ship bridge maneuvering and navigation, anchor handling, ROV operations, crane operations, process control, containment, and controlled pumping and flaring of hydrocarbons.

The system supports the full spectrum of offshore Simultaneous Operations (SIMOPS) activities in support of developing best practices for both surface and subsea marine practices - all conducted in real time and in the safety of a simulated environment.

The simulator features two full offshore service vessel bridges, with 360 degree field of view, an offshore crane simulator, supplied by KONGSBERG company, GlobalSim, a DeepWorks ROV simulator, supplied to KONGSBERG by Fugro Subsea Services Ltd and a separate Process Simulator, for operator training and control system checkout in addition to multiphase flow simulation, supplied by Kongsberg Oil & Gas Technologies.

Superior's working relationship with Shell Offshore was a primary motivator in establishing this state-of-the-art facility. Superior is committed to achieving a safe work environment and these core objectives were incorporated in the system design: "At Superior Energy Services, we believe in ensuring our people are as prepared and properly trained as possible. It makes sense from a safety perspective, from an environmental perspective and from a business perspective - it is simply the right thing to do," said Captain Scott Powell.

"Partnering with Kongsberg Maritime provided a depth of engineering capability that allowed us to mirror a physical model-based simulation solution. This is the closest we can come to creating realistic scenarios without facing these circumstances first hand. Our people will be the best prepared in the industry and will have full confidence in the critical skills they will learn with this state-of-the-art simulator. This multi-team training capability will have a net positive effect on our preparedness and our commitment to health, safety and the environment," continues Powell.

The KONGSBERG Offshore Vessel Simulator allows companies to train employees for the highly technical and often hazardous operations they will encounter in the offshore environment. Kongsberg Maritime simulators are designed to provide realistic scenarios for a wide variety of environmental applications.

In 2011, global orders for offshore facility valued at a total of $69bn, an unprecedented boom and grown by 130% year-on-year, announced China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (CSIC)'s affiliated offshore facility industry development institute last month.

It forecast offshore facility orders would exceed ship orders in value for the first time and lead the future newbuilding market.

The CSIC offshore institute stated that average contract value for offshore drilling/production facilities, including newbuilding and conversion, from 2011 reached $397m per unit, which far exceeds that of commercial ship, reported China's Takungpao.

Last year's flourishing activity in offshore ordering is still being seen in 2012 as well, as of March 15 this year, 2012's new orders for offshore facilities stood at a cumulative of about $13.38bn, which shows similar pace to 2011.

An official from the offshore facility industry development institute said that South Korea's Samsung Heavy Industries, Hyundai HI, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering as well as Singaporean yards are working hard in offshore businesses and their weights on offshore sectors are getting bigger.

He added that Chinese yards are also working for business restructuring. CSIC issued $8bn of convertible bonds last year, half of which are to be invested in offshore and energy facility project.

Besides CISC in China, COSCO Shipbuilding Group, Nantong Mingde Heavy Industry Group, etc. are interested in offshore sector, however, they are in short of related experiences or technical skills than Korean and Singaporean companies, he added.

Largest offshore transformer platform of its type currently under construction worldwide Sylwin Alpha will be installed west of Sylt to provide the grid connection for DanTysk and Butendiek offshore wind farms.

Wismar, Rostock-Warnemünde May 2, 2012, construction starts on the SylWin Alpha offshore transformer platform at Nordic Yards, manufacturer of innovative special ships and major maritime projects for the offshore wind and other industries.

As per the date announced at the contract signing in February this year, the first steel blank cut was made in the presence of representatives of the client, Siemens Energy, and the end customer, TenneT, at the Rostock-Warnemünde yard.

SylWin Alpha is the third offshore transformer platform to be built by Nordic Yards for Siemens Energy.

Three of the six offshore HVDC transformer platforms currently being built worldwide can be found at Nordic Yards - which makes the shipyard group world market leader in the manufacture of transformer platforms.

The topside, the actual platform, and the jacket, the foundation, will be manufactured and optimised at the two yards in Warnemünde and Wismar. With an overall height of approximately 80 metres, a width of 56 metres and a length of over 82 metres, SylWin alpha is not only larger than the two platforms under construction, BorWin beta and HelWin alpha, it is the largest platform of its type to be built so far. The transformer platform will be installed in the North Sea, about 70 kilometres west of Sylt, and will transform and transmit to the German mainland up to 864 megawatts of energy generated by the DanTysk and Butendiek wind farms.

"This day marks an important milestone in the further development of Nordic Yards' competence in the offshore field. Because of the size and extended scope of this project, SylWin alpha is even more complex and challenging than its predecessors. We are looking forward to a continuing excellent working relationship with Siemens and TenneT," says Vitaly Yusufov, owner and Managing Director of Nordic Yards.

Financing for the 10 ultra-large 13,800-teu containerships to be chartered to Taiwan's Evergreen appears to be facing some problems.

Unconfirmed reports from several sources indicate that the purchase option is proving to be a stumbling block, with investors reluctant to commit money to a deal that may leave them on the losing side at the end of the charter period because of the low price Evergreen has negotiated.

The World Ocean Forum aims to deliver cutting-edge information in all sectors of maritime industries while creating potential value for humanity's new frontier. The 6th World Ocean Forum 2012 will bring together policy-makers, private bodies and stakeholders to launch a special session and an exhibition to examine the future of rising marine bio-industry, 'the 1st Asia Marine Journalist Forum' and 'Korea-China Marine Economist Round Table' to open up new opportunities and drive innovation on 'Asia Initiative' in global marine industry this year.

- A reservoir of global ocean knowledge accumulated by the world's prestigious scholars and experts to make the future of the world through the possiblilities and potential of sustainable ocean.

- A venue for an intellectual exchange and discussion of global issues in the top five ocean industries (ship building, offshore plant, logistics, fishery, ocean environment industry and new ocean industry) along with the new trends.

- Presents the model for internal event that shows the characteristics of ocean city, offers impressive cultural experience in Korea, and creates opportunities for global networking with the people in the ocean industry.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Kuwait Oil Tanker Co will start building six oil and gas tankers in 2014 and receive nine others as part of a deal with South Korea's Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, state-run news agency KUNA said on Wednesday, Reuters reports.

The new tankers are part of the crude exporter's strategy to modernise its fleet, KUNA quoted Chairman Nabil Bouresli as saying.

In January the Kuwaiti company had signed a $556 million contract with Daewoo for five tankers.

The South Korean shipbuilder announced on 31 January that it contracted a total of five newbuildings, including four VLCCs and one aframax product carrier.

The five newbuildings are to be built at Okpo yard with deliveries by October 2014.

Since its first VLCC newbuilding placement in 1992, KOTC has contracted a total of 16 vessels at Daewoo, including four VLCCs in 2008, two aframax PCs in 2010 and recently penned five vessels.